[T]o pursue criminal charges against officials at the highest levels—including the former president and the former vice president . . . would set a terrible precedent. . . . That is not to say presidents and vice presidents are always above the law . .
According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.
Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.
Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling [eg. the torture] produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said. [instant karma much?]
Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.” [told you so. and of course, you'd think a normal person, finally noticing that he was doing something "wrong" might u, you know, "stop."]
C.I.A. officers adopted these techniques only after the Justice Department had given its official approval on Aug. 1, 2002, in one of four formerly secret legal memos on interrogation that were released Thursday.
A footnote to another of the memos described a rift between line officers questioning Abu Zubaydah at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand and their bosses at headquarters, and asserted that the brutal treatment may have been “unnecessary.”
“It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again . . .
The United Nation’s top torture investigator has suggested it is illegal under International law for President Barack Obama to announce that the United States government has no intention of prosecuting low-level CIA officers who carried out torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration.
President Barack Obama’s release on Thursday of four Bush administration memos sanctioning torture has been widely praised. However, word that government will go so far as to offer a fully-paid legal defense for agents who applied torture techniques to terror war prisoners has triggered loud criticism.
“Like all other contracting states to the UN convention against torture, the US has committed to conduct criminal investigations of torture and to bring all persons to court against whom there is sound evidence,” Manfred Nowak, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture, told Austrian weekly paper Der Standard.
“They are party to the convention and the convention is very, very clear,” Nowak told the paper. “The fact that you carried out an order doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility.”
“In a brief telephone interview with The Associated Press, Manfred Nowak [...] said the United States had committed itself under the U.N. Convention against Torture to make torture a crime and to prosecute those suspected of engaging in it,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle.
Several branches of the military are reporting significant spikes in the number of suicides committed by both active-duty troops and veterans returning from duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Experts are calling the number of military-related suicides sweeping the country an "epidemic."
Survivors of veterans who committed suicide are starting to file lawsuits, accusing the VA of medical malpractice. The agency also has come under attack by lawmakers and veterans' groups charging that it failed to treat injured veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury, the signature wounds of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The agency also has been accused of manipulating suicide statistics to downplay the problem and systematically misdiagnosing returning combat soldiers who suffer mental illness because their resources are tapped.
"It is incorrect to say that it's not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger," Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom's grand mufti, said in remarks last January quoted in the regional Al-Hayat newspaper. "A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her."
*Suffocation by water poured over a cloth placed over the nose and mouth...
* Prolonged stress standing position, naked, held with the arms extended and chained above the head...
* Beatings by use of a collar held around the detainees' neck and used to forcefully bang the head and body against the wall...
* Beating and kicking, including slapping, punching, kicking to the body and face...
* Confinement in a box to severely restrict movement...
* Prolonged nudity...this enforced nudity lasted for periods ranging from several weeks to several months...
* Sleep deprivation...through use of forced stress positions (standing or sitting), cold water and use of repetitive loud noises or music...
* Exposure to cold temperature...especially via cold cells and interrogation rooms, and...use of cold water poured over the body or...held around the body by means of a plastic sheet to create an immersion bath with just the head out of water.
* Prolonged shackling of hands and/or feet...
* Threats of ill-treatment, to the detainee and/or his family...
* Forced shaving of the head and beard...
* Deprivation/restricted provision of solid food from 3 days to 1 month after arrest...
The ICRC report further clarifies the report's frequent use of the term 'ill-treatment':
The general term "ill-treatment" has been used throughout the following section, however, it should in no way be understood as minimising the severity of the conditions and treatment to which the detainees were subjected. Indeed, as outlined in Section 4 below, and as concluded by this report, the ICRC clearly considers that the allegations of the fourteen include descriptions of treatment and interrogation techniques -- singly or in combination -- that amounted to torture/and or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Carolyn and Raymond Bader, who used to live across from the home where the children were found, said they often heard the father screaming and yelling at the children.
The Baders said they called the sheriff's department and Child Protective Services several times with concerns about the family.
"We did all we could to help these kids," Raymond Bader said tonight. "We tried to protect these kids. We did what we could."
Carolyn Bader said a friend had called her with the news of the deaths.
"I couldn't believe he'd actually done it. Do I think he was capable of it? Sure," she said, referring to the father. "It just shocks me. I'm totally shocked. What could five children do that was so bad? I can't imagine what would go through someone's head to make them do something like this."
Dale Lund, another neighbor in the mobile-home park, said the boy who was killed played at times with his grandson and the two shared the same school-bus stop. The boys attended elementary school together, Lund said.
The slain children played in their own yard most of the time, he said.
"They pretty much kept to themselves over there," Lund said of the family.
Lund's wife, Sheree Lund, said, "We're tore up. We're just tore up. Why the kids, you know?"
Lund said the father was considered by neighbors to be "plenty mean" and he "kept a real tight rein on the kids."
GARDNER, Mass. -- A woman who believes she was being stalked by a cult has been charged with stabbing her 2-year-old daughter 100 times with scissors . . .
Johnson, 38, also used an electrical cord from a dryer to try and strangle the toddler, police said, but the security guard and two residents separated mother and child just before police arrived.
"I heard a woman screaming very loudly that she was going to 'Kill, kill, I have to kill you, Die, die, die,'" said resident Real Belliveau, 65, who lives just down the hall from the laundry room. . . he thought the child was already dead because she was limp, covered in blood and had the cord wrapped around her neck.
The girl was taken to a hospital suffering from as many as 100 wounds to her head, neck and torso, but many of them were superficial, police Chief Neil Erickson said. The child, who is now in the custody of state child welfare authorities, was taken to a hospital and is expected to survive.
[and then she'll come and see someone like . . . well, NBFH. Who has heard this story before, thank you very much.]
The state Department of Children and Families made a check on the girl at her home in Turners Falls, about 35 miles west of Gardner, the day before the attack, . . . the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and WBZ-TV reported. Department spokeswoman Alison Goodwin refused to confirm the report Thursday and said only the department is now investigating.
[DCF checked on her the day before. DCF workers have twice as many cases as are recommended. Do you think that workers carrying a recommended caseload might have done a better job?]
. . .Johnson has a history of depression and had not been taking her medication . . .[Oh. Well, that wouldn't have had anything to do with unaffordable health care, would it? Or being unable to afford her meds and treatment? How about health insuance not paying for coordination of care?] Binder said, adding she does not remember the attack in the laundry room.
"She seems to be very paranoid," he said.
Johnson was held without bail on a number of charges including attempted murder and ordered to undergo a competency evaluation at her arraignment Thursday in Gardner District Court. A dangerousness hearing was scheduled for April 17.
May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness! [NOT]
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering! [NOT]
May all beings rest in the great evenness of mind
free from passion, aggression, and prejudice! [NOT]
Bill O’Reilly, however, has shown his total disregard for rape victims in the following statement made on his radio show: “Now Moore, Jennifer Moore, 18, on her way to college. She was 5-foot-2, 105 pounds, wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff. Now, again, there you go. So every predator in the world is gonna pick that up at two in the morning. She's walking by herself on the West Side Highway . . .
Nobel Peace Prize winner banned from a peace conference?Dalai Lama Banned from South African Peace Conference
"Nobel [peace prize] winners Desmond Tutu and FW de Clerk to boycott anti-racism conference in World Cup run-up after Chinese pressure forces ban on Tibetan spiritual leader
Two of South Africa's Nobel peace prize winners, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and FW de Klerk, have pulled out of a Johannesburg conference to fight racism after what they branded as Pretoria's "disgraceful" decision to ban the Dalai Lama from attending following Chinese pressure.
The Nobel peace prize committee also said it would boycott this Friday's conference, which is dedicated to tackling racism ahead of the 2010 World Cup.
The row threatens to draw in Nelson Mandela, who, with his fellow South African laureates, invited the Tibetan spiritual leader, and further embarrasses South Africa, which has been accused of squandering its moral authority since ending apartheid by blocking UN security council moves to pressure rogue governments in Burma and Zimbabwe.
Tutu, who won the prize for his resistance to white rule, told Johannesburg's Sunday Independent newspaper he will not attend the conference to discuss how to use the World Cup preparations to combat racism and xenophobia if the Tibetan spiritual leader is not present. . . "
